Our writer discovered that a lot of her time-saving desires were sucking up all of her...time. So she detoxed and saw her creativity—and output—rise.

As a writer with grand creative dreams, I want wild sparks to fly in my head when seemingly incongruous ideas collide. Trouble is, I get to my desk in the morning—cluttered with clippings, receipts, yesterday's coffee cup—and partly to avoid this less than stirring manifestation of mental chaos, I check e-mail. A typical morning's haul includes a batch of work-related updates; a breathless advert hawking Lil Wayne ringtones; a note from my mom, bless her, featuring 10 points of family news; plus a smattering of those pesky Facebook alerts heralding new messages in my account. So I toggle my browser over to say, "Hey, what up?" back at my buds.

After trolling a few news sites—and, okay, Remodelista.com to gape at gorgeous homes—I square my shoulders to tell myself that it's absoposilutely time to buckle down to work. But feeling drifty and enervated from pinballing around so many far-flung thoughts (Mom—Lil Wayne?), I struggle for purchase. And, before I know it, my fingers reflexively make the keystrokes to check e-mail again, restarting the whole head-spinning cycle. I can't tell you how many times this happens throughout the day—five, 10, 20?

A growing body of research shows it's no surprise that so-called knowledge workers like me have come to feel like digital rats scurrying nowhere fast. The bells and whistles intended to increase efficiency often have a countervailing effect because we simply cannot focus on two demanding tasks simultaneously. "People can't parallel process," says Gloria Mark, PhD, a psychologist who studies human interactions with computers at UC Irvine. "You can do things in two different modalities—read a book with music in the background—but you can't have two tasks in the foreground and do well."

Juggling too much can be deadly: Texting while driving—driving while intexticated—increases a driver's crash risk by a hairraising 23 percent. But even the costs of multitasking, a frank misnomer, while deskbound are alarming. Microsoft conducted a study of its own employees last year and found that, after being distracted, it took them more than 15 minutes to return to the task at hand. Mark observes that office workers typically spend only 11 minutes on any one job before being interrupted, and, what's more, that the interruptions are self-initiated nearly half of the time. Putting it all together, the tech-research firm Basex estimates that interferences waste 28 percent of the average information worker's day.

Gulp. So how do I get on a serious distraction diet? I'm not talking shack-in-the-mountains abstinence. Rather, I need some solid advice on how to get more done in fewer hours than I currently spend staring at the blue screen.

Efficiency expert David Allen, whose 2001 book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has sold more than a million copies and made him a legend among frenzied workers, has developed a program to systematize work flow. First up, he tells me when I call, is to organize your office so as to radiate efficiency (see tips at Davidco.com). Easy enough: I spend an afternoon filing the receipts, clippings, and kids' drawings cluttering my work space. But when I fret to Allen about my dull-headedness and slavishness to e-mail, he chuckles and assures me I'm not a "lone stranger." The "crazy-busy numbness" I describe fells plenty of highpowered executives, he says, calling it a "Puritan-ethic response to the feeling of `I'm not sure what I'm doing, what I should be doing, so let me look like I'm working hard so I can get off my own back.' "

One of Allen's central theories is that the things we don't address in a timely way—disorganized files, unfocused longrange projects—drain our energy when we try (mostly unsuccessfully) to suppress thoughts about them. To reduce "drag on the system," Allen recommends a "mind sweep": writing down every thought bobbing in the back of your brain, however half-baked, about everything you want to accomplish on various time lines—today, next week, before the end of the year. Once future goals have been "captured," he suggests creating tasksegregated lists, such as "calls to make" and "topics to research." Another negative loop to close are e-mails or voice mails that can be dealt with in two minutes or less, because any item that takes less than two minutes to handle "would take longer to store or track."

One item that came up in my sweep was that for weeks I've been putting off answering a publicist's e-mail asking if I'd write about one of his clients—my failure to reply is gnawing at me. My hunch is that the story won't fly for timing reasons, but somehow I can't just write back explaining this. Allen gets excited at my predicament: "Is there anything else you need to research or do before you send that e-mail?" Well, I could e-mail my editor to confirm my suspicion about the timing. "Gotcha!" Allen exclaims. "I bet the reason you've been avoiding it was that you didn't fully understand what the next step was—you needed more data. So what do you need to do now?" Write the editor, I say sheepishly. How can something that now seems so obvious have been so weirdly obscure?

Donning an Allen-ish thinking cap, I start writing detailed to-do lists—common sense, perhaps, but something I've never done faithfully— and making better use of my e-mail program's file system: moving messages pertaining to work-in-progress into separate folders and pitching many of the rest. Putting on paper exactly what steps I need to take for each project does promote peace of mind, I find. And in my eagerness to tick items off on my "next action" lists, my productivity ramps up.

Still, there are days of backsliding. I go to research something online, but once out on the wild Web, lose my way—and vast tundras of time—wandering further away from whatever I was looking for with each click of the mouse. Which is why I was glad to consult with Paul Silverman, an executive coach for Fortune 100 companies who teaches from a Zen perspective—and still serves as the head monk of a monastery in Japan where he lived for 13 years. I happened upon Silverman at a conference at which tech engineers extolled upcoming applications—such as multiple split-screen windows—that could help customers review e-mail more quickly and track appointments while still attending to their primary work. But these products struck me as tricked-out multitasking enablers. By contrast, Silverman's approach—schooling people to perform tasks with single-minded attention at "the right time, in the right place, with the right tools"—seemed refreshingly simple.

While meditation appears to have a measurable positive impact on concentration—researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found that seasoned meditators catch more fast-moving signals in lab experiments than others—Silverman says practicing even a few simple mindfulness techniques can bring workers in from the virtual fog. Like Allen, he begins with a file system, but it's more streamlined, with one drawer for frontburner projects (ideally at closest reach), another for reference materials that you may need in a month or so, and a third for finished stuff that has "no predictable retrievability" but should be kept for legal or other reasons.

To help keep yourself on track, Silverman suggests daily rituals, citing some of those he performed in the monastery: carefully cleaning his soup bowl with a cup of water and a pickle slice (which he ate as the final step of the process) and rolling up his futon every morning. Later, as I'm putting my files back in their proper drawers after I've finished with them, I tell myself I'm just rollin' up the futon—clearing the decks for whatever needs to happen next. It's hard to capture in words how this effort to operate with greater purpose and precision produces the desired effect, but it does: I feel more serene and confident.

Still, on my bad days I do wonder if I'm at some level struggling with so-called Internet addiction. Psychologist David Greenfield, who directs a counseling service for technology addiction in West Hartford, Connecticut, says he tries to steer clear of labeling people, but he believes that the kind of "compulsive e-mail checking and general surfing around" that I do amounts to at least Internet abuse. His reasoning is that it's impairing my functioning, maybe not profoundly, but enough "to curtail some of [my] productivity."

One reason e-mail is so seductive—on top of forcing us to dissociate from our surroundings so that we lose track of time—is that it stimulates the brain's dopamine-charged reward centers "on a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, which is a fancy way of saying you get a reward in an unpredictable fashion," Greenfield says. Most of the e-mails flying at us are ho-hum, but every once in a while we get good ones—a type of reinforcement "that is highly resistant to extinction." E-mail's pull, and "the illusion that we have to respond to it immediately," he adds, has only gotten stronger with portable and wireless devices.

But having gotten my e-mail-eyeballing down to three times on workdays and once on the weekend (scrubbing my inbox clean per Allen and Silverman really did diminish its lure), I can report that no tragedy has befallen me—no contract retracted, no friendship dissolved. That's true despite the fact that I'm saving at least an hour a day that formerly would've been frittered away in webworld, which is powerful incentive to keep that egg timer ticking when I'm online. And, taking Greenfield's advice to substitute another pleasant activity when I get the urge for a Gmail fix, I'm calling friends and playing my favorite Wilco songs, which I hope will establish heavier dendritic connections around these new, reenergizing habits.

I also often think of something Winifred Gallagher, a science writer and breast cancer survivor who wrote a wonderful book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, told me, with whipcrack in her voice: "Your mental energy and attention are finite resources. You need to decide where you want to invest that energy. We have to take ourselves seriously enough to say, `What am I here for? What's my point?' "

The fastest e-mail reader east of the Rockies? No, that's not who I want to be. Remember those grand creative dreams I mentioned? Well, they're gradually coming back into focus.

Staying Focused

1. "Literally put the time down," Paul Silverman says when I ask if it's okay to just keep a rough idea in my mind of what I want to accomp lish on a workday. "people only put down meetings and conference calls on their calendars. But 80 percent of your stuff is work-work. When's that going to happen?"

2. Check e-mail only two to four times throughout the day—and, yes, record precise times when (and only when) this will happen.

3. Block in a bit of wiggle room. When creating an hour-by-hour schedule, "always give yourself more time than you think you'll need," Silverman says. "If things go well, you can find ways to use the extra time. The inverse, though, is just too stressful."—Louisa Kamps

A toxic job is like a bad boyfriend, says MSNBC Coanchor Mika Brzezikski: You need to find the strength to say enough's enough. Her new book shows that she knows what she's talking about.

When Mika Brzezinski calls for our interview at 5 p.m., she's squeezing in her five-mile daily run after having risen at 3:30 a.m. to cohost MSNBC's Morning Joe and WABC radio's The Joe Scarborough Show. "I'm watching the leaves come down," she says, hardly panting. "It's gorgeous!" Ironically, we're talking about her new book, All Things at Once, a memoir with advice for career moms about the pitfalls of manic multitasking. "Honestly, I'm scared to death," she admits. "Because everyone who I gave galleys to, the first thing they say is, `Wow. That's honest.' I'm like, Is that good or bad?"

Brzezinski, whose formidable father, Zbigniew, was Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has two daughters with husband James Hoffer, a correspondent at WABC TV in New York City. She has written with admirable candor in hopes of offering readers more than the average book aimed at working moms with families—ground arguably already overtilled—and her blunt account of being axed from CBS, in particular, seems to capture the prevailing mood of the culture. In 2006, after she'd spent five years there on CBS Evening News Weekend Edition, CBS Sunday Morning, and 60 Minutes, Dan Rather's career-ending debacle over President Bush's Air National Guard record sent the place into a tailspin. New management came in, and Brzezinski was soon fired.

Brzezinski, who was a dark-horse candidate for the anchor chair Katie Couric won, thinks she knows why she was let go: "I heard there was another high-level executive who just didn't think I was all that attractive," she writes. "When asked what he was looking for in his next nightly news anchor, the suit said, `It's like porn. I'll know it when I see it.' I read that and thought, Hmm. Isn't it nice, to have your work likened...to hard-core porn?"

At 40, after an unsuccessful stint as a stay-at-home mom ("[I]t wasn't me. I tried"), Brzezinski went on a slew of "legendarily bad job interviews" and ended up doing freelance news cut-ins on MSNBC—a giant step backward for her. She tried not to read about her fall from grace on online news sites: "She must be so desperate. Poor thing," Brzezinski mimics. "Did she have plastic surgery while she was gone?"

When former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough was up for Don Imus' morning slot (in the wake of Imus' whacked comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team), Scarborough bumped into Brzezinski in the hallway at MSNBC's Secaucus, New Jersey, studios and asked her if she'd consider cohosting his audition. The two effortlessly clicked on the air.

"I had to find my place on that show," says Brzezinski, who got a lot of good press for Morning Joe in 2007 when she spontaneously apologized to viewers for leading with Paris Hilton's release from jail at the top of the news—and then defiantly ripped up the script when producers pushed her to read it again. "I went into NBC at a very tenuous time. The show was just starting, and I said, `I appreciate what you're giving me, but I want to be on this show. And if you don't put me on this show permanently, you're going to be a bad boyfriend. And do you know what a bad boyfriend is?' And I remember the then vice president of NBC looking at me like, What are you talking about, crazy lady? And I was like, `A bad boyfriend is someone you give everything to, plus everything else. You are just doing it all for him, expecting something in return. And it never happens, because you give, give, give, but you don't demand to get married, because you don't value what it is that you bring to the table. And I value what I bring to the table, and I expect you to marry me, or this relationship's over.' " Needless to say, reader, they married her.

With the nation's unemployment rate approaching 10 percent, what's Brzezinski's advice for making a midcareer comeback? "I guess I'd say, don't plan it," she says. "If you believe in yourself, in who you are and who you're meant to be, it will find you."—Candice Rainey

New research and thinking puncture the old axiom that the only person you can change is yourself.

One of the most oft-repeated bits of relationship advice is that you shouldn't try to change your partner. "Marriage is not a reform school," Ann Landers famously scolded a change-minded wife in one of her columns, reflecting the folk wisdom—and general opinion among couples therapists—that trying to make over your partner is not only a fruitless pastime (he'll only quit smoking or lose weight when he is ready, we're told), but one that marks you as a nag. As Jesus put it: Judge not lest ye be judged...to be controlling and codependent.

This advice is, of course, as ubiquitous as it is ignored. And lately a slew of thinkers—from economists to scientists and "change seminar leaders" (more on that later)—are advancing a new theory about why we can't stop picking at our partners: because it works.

People who need people are the luckiest people because they have someone to tell them to go to the gym, or that they don't need another margarita, and, another thing, that their tendency to pout is not charming. Relationships are reform school, and thank goodness, because without them, a lot of us would do nothing but eat Devil Dogs, masturbate, and watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta until our fat rolls fused to our couch cushions.

In their book Connected, about how social networks shape our minds and bodies, Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, and James H. Fowler, PhD, note what a boon marriage is to people's health— most dramatically to men, who on average live seven years longer if they're hitched (women live two years longer). "Married men abandon what have been called `stupid bachelor tricks,' " they write. "They get rid of the motorcycle in the garage, stop using illegal drugs, eat regular meals, get a job, come home at a reasonable hour.... This process of social control, with wives modifying their husbands' health behaviors, appears to be crucial to how men's health improves with marriage." The effect seems to be somewhat mitigated by the strength of one's marriage—people in unhappy marriages had more accelerated declines in health. Why? Probably because if your spouse doesn't love you, he or she is more likely to say, "Eh, I'd try to get her to stop snorting coke but The Real Housewives of Atlanta marathon is coming on." To love someone is to harangue them.

Salvador Minuchin, MD, the 88-yearold granddaddy of family therapy, recently said that, in fact, he never expects people to change themselves. "In a struggle with yourself, somebody has to lose, and that will be you," he told Psychotherapy Networker. "So when I work with a couple, I usually start out by saying to a wife, `Okay, so how do you want to change him?' And often the wife will say, `I cannot change him. I need to change myself.' And then I will say, `You cannot change yourself, but you can change him.' "

So what's the best way to get your partner in line? In How to Change Someone You Love, author Brad Lamm, a self-described "interventionist and change seminar leader," suggests staged interventions: You gather the appropriate people, depending on the problem at hand (if your spouse is an end-stage alcoholic, the group might include everyone from his mother to his boss; if you just think he needs to lose 10 pounds, it could be simply you and him), and then tell the person how much you love him, why you're concerned, and outline a thoughtful plan for change.

Lamm says that the vast majority of people agree to their loved ones' plan and actually make the requested change. A 2008 study found that alcoholics were more likely to be sober a year later if they'd been forced into treatment by the courts or through an intervention; people who checked themselves in for treatment of their own volition were the least successful. Thinking it through, it makes sense: If a group of my favorite people came to me and told me they loved me and had gone through the trouble of coming up with a solution to a huge problem I had, I would be deeply moved, relieved, and, probably, agree to whatever they suggested. "It comes back to love," Lamm says when I call him. "Love is the best motivator in our lives. The greatest stories of all time are about love: They touch us, they move us; there's nothing else like that. Ooh, I just got goose bumps talking about love!"

If you're not the lovey-dovey goose-bumpy type—or if you prefer a more passive-aggressive route—economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein document myriad ways you can subtly sway people's choices in their book, Nudge. Humans turn out to be massive conformists who will do whatever the gal next to them is doing. Telling someone that most people are better at something than they are can make them get their act together. For example, if you said, "I just read a survey reporting that nine out of 10 men actually do put the toilet seat down," your husband would be more likely to start putting the toilet seat down himself. Conformity is that strong (so be careful how you use this power— the original conformity researcher, Solomon Asch, hypothesized that it was this bit of human nature that influenced nice, normal Germans to become Nazis).

In fact, if you want your spouse to be more like you, all you really have to do is just hang out being you. Studies have found that 72 percent of marriages exhibit "homogamy"—monogamous couples end up being a lot alike in religious, political, financial, and cultural views. "Conventional wisdom has it that if two people live together for a long time, they start to look like each other," Thaler and Sunstein write, which "turns out to be true. In fact, couples who end up looking alike also tend to be happier." For the curious: They grow to look alike partly because of nutrition—shared diets and eating habits— but much of the effect is simple imitation of facial expressions.

So, if you love your partner, change him, and let him change you. Resistance is futile, and you'll be happier anyway.—Rachael Combe

Our frazzled yet fearless reporter applies the lessons of a new book on "superstress" and wonders, Who has the time to be calm?

Even if I wasn't exactly born to stress, I was certainly bred for it. My family stressed together as naturally as the von Trapps harmonized on "Edelweiss." On weekend drives, Mom would often needle Dad about something stupid he'd done, so with jaw clenched, veins apulse, he'd step on the gas of the old red Volvo, and the engine would whine as the car picked up speed and my mother goaded him, "What are you going to do? Kill us all? Fine, then! Just kill us all!" At which point he'd push the pedal to the floor while my sisters and I groped the backseat leather banquette for seat belts.

This was the Goldman family's master class on stress. It's still very much a part of me. I am technically stressing as I type the word stressing, knowing that this story is already two days late and certainly too lousy for publication. But by now, I don't even bother paying attention to all manner of feeling nervous as it relates to my job. Were I logging onto Orbitz to rent a car to drive off a cliff so that I could weasel out of writing this story—that I'd consider a sign of stress. But this generalized edgy discomfort because I have too much shit to accomplish in too little time? It's just what work feels like.

Though I might not actually define what I'm feeling as stress, this sensation of okayness may in itself indicate that I'm suffering from something that sounds far worse than boring old stress. This, according to Roberta Lee, MD, is "SuperStress," a state she has both defined and offered a cure for in a new volume, The SuperStress Solution. Lee is a disciple of Andrew Weil, MD, a guru of integrative medicine, which recognizes the importance of Western medicine while still emphasizing the efficacy of holistic remedies: the importance of healthy diet, exercise, and well-being-producing activities like meditation.

Lee's book defines superstress as a number of smaller stressors—work deadlines, noise pollution, and, in my case, a year-old baby and a brand-new mortgage taken out just before the dawning realization that the economy no longer values the occupation I've chosen. All of this morphs into one big state called superstress, the effects of which, she posits, are similar to those of posttraumatic stress disorder. Who knew that getting stuck in traffic next to a Hyundai blaring Ashlee Simpson's "L.O.V.E." allows one to feel approximately what John McCain did after spending five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton.

The first of Lee's three "overarching beliefs" of the superstressed is that "they believe that they're not stressed." I suppose I'd fit into that category. Of course, so would the Dalai Lama and Matthew McConaughey. But the fifth question on Lee's first diagnostic questionnaire, "How often do you find yourself actively feuding with someone?" got me thinking about how last Sunday morning, I was standing in my kitchen shouting "Fuck you!" over and over into the phone to one of my oldest friends because of a misunderstanding over the pork bun appetizer I'd ordered the night before. Yes, Dr. Lee, homicidal rage related to pork buns might in fact indicate I'm superstressed. So I will do the "Four-Week SuperStress Solution Program," but sadly, I will not be able to follow your recommendation to embrace kaizen, the Japanese concept of making changes in small increments. My editor has allotted me only four days to cleanse myself. To give the program a fair trial, I will not attempt to compress a week's worth of destressing into one day. Rather, I will devote myself to doing a typical day of destressing activities from each of the four weeks. Here are the results.

Day One: Building Calm Into Your Life

Good stressful start! Last night had nightmare starring ELLE's managing editor, my old buddy Sara Culley, who in dream is tasked with cutting fat from the budget, so she photocopies and distributes my crappiest stories to honchos, hoping they'll downsize me. At 5 a.m., Henry wakes up crying, pajamas and crib meticulously poop-caked. "Who do you think you are? Suzanne Somers?" wife Robin inquires as I wolf down fish oil, magnesium, B12, plus six more tablets, which will increase to 15 by Day Four ($180 blown at the Vitamin Shoppe!). Breakfast shake with blueberries, yogurt, and wheat germ pretty delicious, especially if you value chewiness in drinks. I stick to only two cups of morning coffee, and green or herbal tea post-lunch, curb my three-can-a-day Diet Coke habit, but can't seem to keep track of number of glasses of water, supposed to add up to at least eight by day's end. Copy and tape affirmations on bathroom mirror ("Endless good comes to me in an effortless way") and do 20 minutes of free-form journaling, which ends up being not a meditation on clouds or birds, but obsessive thoughts about the person ducking my interview requests for another story. Crap! Already 4 p.m. and logged only 659 of today's assigned 6,500 daily steps, so blow off long-planned drink date with an old friend. Have to get in 20-minute daily exercise— a neighborhood jog—but with clothing changes and shower it actually takes closer to 45 minutes. Speed-walk to grocery store to boost footstep count, shop for ingredients for Dr. Lee's Asian Noodle Dinner Salad, but after overcooking first batch of Asian noodles to mush, serve them at 8:30, rather than 7 p.m., stress-free cutoff time recommended by Dr. Lee. Noodle recipe surprisingly tasty; inhale twice her recommended serving. Slurp a couple glasses of antioxidant-rich, cardiofriendly red wine; scarf some dark chocolate almonds, which Dr. Lee would probably okay as mood enhancers. Healthy baked pear a big hit with Robin. Even bigger hit is candlelight bath with drops of vetiver oil to encourage presleep relaxation.

Diet day. Morning shake's okay, and lunch—frozen squash nuked with water and a bouillon cube—palatable, though can't imagine the desolation I'd feel eating it for seven days straight, per Dr. Lee's instructions. Venture deep into Chinatown to purchase exotic ingredients for Dr. Lee's grandfather's recipe, a supposedly miraculous restorative chicken soup, a cup of which Dr. Lee encourages me to enjoy along with my dinner of brown rice, black beans, and steamed chard, a meal I could imagine being the vegan option on death row. Crap! Left the house without pedometer. At New York supermarket, only employee who speaks English manages to find both cellophane packages of dried astragalus and codonopsis root, but nobody in the place has even heard of dioscorea root (and this store has everything, including a whole steam table devoted to roast chicken feet). Back home, try to do mandated "still points" exercise as I imagine the sound of the ocean in Tulum, Mexico, but mind keeps returning to how nasty soup simmering on the stove is going to taste. Luckily, heavy physical activity beyond 7,000 daily steps discouraged during detox diet, but still only manage to clock about 1,600, plus the 2,000 or so on my Chinatown trip. Dinner is dismal—Robin eats leftover Asian noodles and won't even try soup, which with floating roots brings to mind the scene in Poltergeist where the dead Indians burble up into the swimming pool. The taste? Compromised and feeble as my liver and kidneys may remain, I resolve to never, ever again cook with goji berries. Emboldened by results of last night's bath, I improvise and sprinkle dried lavender flowers in tonight's. "Messy and unpleasant," Robin reports, toweling off. I enjoy squishing them in my fingers for a couple minutes but soon am obsessing about how I'm to clean them up. Don't want to face this and Henry's poop art at 6 a.m., so try to corral buds into drain. They prefer to stick to my body. In candlelight I look like I'm covered with flies. Stomach grumbling, I do my best to pick out remaining lavender embedded in chest hair.

Missions accomplished unrelated to SuperStress Solution: not one damned thing.

Incomplete SuperStress Solution daily assignments: failed to drink eight glasses of water, do half of my journaling, take recommended number of steps, or "transform...sleeping space into an arena of Zenlike serenity."

Average Stress Level: higher than yesterday. Strangely, hunger's not relaxing to me.

Day Three: Restoring and Rebuilding

Find myself accomplishing household jobs I've put off for some time—buying a thermometer to adjust the temperature of our new oven, since it just loves burning cookies, and getting on the phone to order a replacement wheel for the dishwasher rack, the lost one now probably rolling around in some sector of Henry's small intestine. Seems that these little chores serve as great techniques to procrastinate doing all the destressing I don't want to do today, journaling chief among them. I do choke down supplements, tape a new affirmation ("I can manage my time") onto bathroom mirror, and eat from Dr. Lee's diet, but not much else. I opt out of the "Nourishing Your Body and Soul" activity, which is to prepare a very special meal for just myself, set out flowers and best china, turn on relaxing music, and take a whole hour eating this dinner in hopes that I will be able to "renew relationship with self." Unless I want to also renew relationship with the living room and sleep on cold couch, Robin will be included in the meal of lentils and salmon.

Missions accomplished unrelated to SuperStress Solution: apart from oven and dishwasher fixing, attended a screening for work, sent out 10 e-mails, checked in with an editor about a story.

Uncompleted SuperStressSolution daily assignments: Where to begin? Nearly 4,000 steps shy of 7,500-step goal; skipped 20-minute workout; failed to answer journaling question, "What is cluttering my life?" or fill out the "Transitions and Goals" template diagram, let alone actually try to fix anything in my life that seems "out of control." Nor did I attempt to classify every action I performed today in categories like "essential," "essential but can be delegated," or "not essential but done because of fear of disapproval or a sense of obligation." Though certainly journaling would have fallen into that last category if I'd bothered to do it.

Average Stress Level: low, out of a sense of resignation about my inability to be a competent stress fighter. Feeling like a big fat failure. (Fat because I had to test recalibrated oven by baking peanut butter cookies, loaded with sugar, which Dr. Lee labels a worthless "bad mood" food.)

Day Four: Nurturing Community and the Spirit

Sick of failing to reach Dr. Lee's footstep goals, I resolve to see how long it will take to walk 8,000 steps, her recommended number today. Leave apartment in Brooklyn, 9:36 a.m., at a good clip, and reach goal 78 minutes later, after a glorious walk that takes me over the Brooklyn Bridge, up through the Financial District, and into SoHo, landing me exactly in front of trendy Mexican restaurant La Esquina on Kenmare Street, a place I never would have dreamed of walking to from home, and a 3.62-mile trek. It's a significant walk in a single day for me, let alone someone who follows Dr. Lee's tips to try to pace while making calls and to always walk to the farthest bathroom in the office. (And at least once a day, who doesn't want to create some distance?) Grab a pot of mums from a florist and walk the additional 4,632 steps to Robin's office at Park Avenue and 29th, in spirit of this week's nurturing goals. Crap! She's out at a meeting when I arrive. Typical. Head home (via subway), and rather than teaching my friends kirtan kriya meditation or tempting neighborhood dads to beat me with pipes by following Dr. Lee's recommendation to "play hopscotch with the neighbors' daughter," I take her suggestion to hang out with my kid. So I play his belly like bongos, and make his polar bear attack him with nips and kisses until Henry's snorting with laughter.

Work accomplished unrelated to SuperStress Solution: none, but really, who's going to bitch about anything when your job requires you to spend a warm fall Friday outside in New York City?

Uncompleted SuperStress Solution daily assignments: don't drink nearly enough water, nor do I "make an appointment for a pap smear." No chance to journal or exercise. Totally fail to complete the Doing Well by Doing Good special project, unless I can count the five minutes spent during Day Two's Chinatown trip helping old Italian ladies figure out MetroCard machine. I'll just consider myself grandfathered in on that one.

The SuperStress Solution, it occurs to me, could really only be performed by someone who has gotten superstressed as a result of the constant bickering among her 100 cats, or some unresolved communication issues with a meth dealer—in other words, someone who doesn't actually have something as time-consuming as a job to stress him out. Otherwise, who'd have the time? For four days, my only task was the SuperStress Solution, a workload so onerous that I began to feel those familiar pangs of chaos and worthlessness that for years would descend upon me during periods of work stress, feelings so desperate that they eventually led me to the pill I still take daily to keep me afloat. I couldn't keep it all straight, the glasses of water, the fish oil supplements, the constant feeling that every minute I spent doing my job was depriving my journal of answers to the question, "What is cluttering my life?" The feelings that even my medication wasn't strong enough to fully suppress, I realized, were described perfectly by Dr. Lee's second and third overarching beliefs of the superstressed: (2) They believe that they don't have enough time for everything they need to get done. (3) They believe there is no way out of the time-crunch bind. That is, they have no hope.

For a second opinion, I call my lifelong overachiever friend Jamie, who, before recently joining the nonprofit sector, had the most stressful job I can think of. Jamie, 37, was an analyst at a midsize hedge fund for nine years, and for five of them, she was a partner responsible for managing $400 million of other people's money. Most years, she pulled down a seven-figure income. But the lucre came with a price: Jamie would regularly suffer nightmares, such as the one in which the CEO of a corporation she'd invested in would get arrested, decimating the company stock. Romance? Feh. "I didn't have the energy or interest to engage emotionally," she says. Feelings of happiness and well-being at work? Please. "There were exceptions," she says, "but the vast majority of people in the industry were miserable."

Jamie's own most miserable days began when a stock on which she'd bet heavily began to slide. Every day, she'd skulk into the office, a pit in her stomach, proposing quid pro quos with God to make the nosedive stop and praying her boss wouldn't again summon her into his office to shout about how incompetent she was. The slide lasted four months and dragged the fund down by $30 million: superstress—perhaps even megafuckingstress—defined. How, I wonder, would she have reacted if I'd told her that relief would come if she just started preparing her own food, meditating daily, journaling? "During that time, I had so much pressure on me that the last thing I would have wanted was more things to add to my to-do list," she says. "All I wanted to do when I wasn't at work was to veg out in front of American Idol."

In the period between leaving her job and finding her current full-time volunteer gig, she found that merely removing all those job pressures didn't wholly rid her life of stress. "The unstructured time was making me a little crazy," she says, and in fact, it might have been a good idea to fill it up with such things as Dr. Lee's suggested yoga, or taking a "tumble with your pets."

"This method would be better for people who don't have enough to do," Jamie replies. "When you have that luxury of time, that's when your brain can start going where you don't want it to." Everything Dr. Lee wants for me, I want too. I want a life devoid of superstress, a diet like that of one of those ropy 110-year-old Mediterranean villagers, meditation while the breeze blows my Yanni-like mane. But it's all just going to have to wait until stress removal starts paying well enough to send Henry to college.—Andrew Goldman

Only a self-admitted odd bodkin like Daniel J. Siegel could come up with a book like Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation ( Bantam), a synthesis of mainstream psychology, Buddhist- influenced meditation training, and cutting-edge neurobiology. Siegel, 52, a psychiatry professor at UCLA with a private psychotherapy practice in West L.A., is the rare shrink—maybe the only shrink—who will ask patients to make a fist to model their brains so he can point and describe what's going on in there. Siegel has been tracing brain-behavior connections for his entire career, and early on he came up with the concept of mindsight—our ability to check in with our own sense of self, which ultimately enables us to connect with others. Five years ago, he discovered research showing that meditation can thicken the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that largely regulates our moods, responses, and sense of well-being. Eureka! Now Siegel had proof that we can direct the development of our own brains, and a nifty tool—" follow-the-breath" meditation—to improve our mindsight. The idea for his new book was born: By regularly focusing on our inner lives, be it through meditation or just by calmly taking stock of our experiences, both good and bad, we can direct our brains to develop in healthy ways. And by sharpening our mindsight, we can "see" past everyday dissatisfactions as well as the more profound emotional problems, such as clinical depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, that bring patients to Siegel's office every day. We asked Siegel to explore his theories with us and got a crash course in what he calls "brain brushing" in the bargain.

ELLE: One of your messages is that if we can see how our brains make us who we are, whatever the neurochemistry of it, we may not need a scrip every time we feel our life is falling apart.

DS: I believe medications can be helpful—however, we can now empower people to know that the way they focus their attention can change the firing of, and ultimately the structure of, their brains.

ELLE: Why is it important to develop mindsight?

DS: Our hot buttons can get pressed by other people or by conditions such as being hungry and sleepy, and then our prefrontal cortex can be temporarily disabled. Things go kind of haywire. You "flip out," and areas in the brain beneath the prefrontal cortex have a field day. Survival reflexes like fight-or-flight kick in, and you do things to people—your friends, your kids—that you'd never do otherwise. For any of us, it helps to know why we lost our minds.

ELLE: You write that mindsight isn't the same as mindfulness.

DS: Mindsight is the ability to monitor the mind's internal flow, but it's also the capacity to modify it toward an integrated state. It looks at relationships and brain mechanisms. It embraces mindfulness but takes it to a different realm.

ELLE: You say that when we're depressed, we're running on low mental energy and processing the same information over and over again. When we feel overwhelmed by thoughts or emotions, it's too much energy and information—chaos. The job of the integrated person—whose right and left brain hemispheres are in sync, whose higher-order brain centers aren't being overpowered by the lower, instinctual ones—is to find the happy middle ground.

DS: Yes, emotional rigidity and chaos are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and they're both examples of impaired integration. Once you can monitor your internal world, you can move the flow of energy and information toward an integrated state.

ELLE: Give us the short course on making our mindsight 20/20.

DS: Note the times in your life when you feel really stuck or overwhelmed with a flood of thoughts or emotions or memories. See if you can tell when there's rigidity or chaos—that's the starting point. Then there are things we can do every day, what I call "brushing the brain," just like we brush our teeth. Do a basic breath-awareness exercise for two or three minutes. Then review what your five senses are telling you: What am I seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling on my skin? Then invite the sixth sense in: What is your body telling you, your heart, your intestines, your muscles? And then the seventh sense, mental activities: What thoughts, memories, feelings do you have right now? What intentions do you have for the day? And finally, the eighth sense: How do I feel connected to others or to the world at large? This is a way to keep the brain clear of all the muck that gets stuck there.—Joseph Hooper

I was having tea with one of my smartest friends when she asked me if I had arrived at an answer. Did I believe in God? I knew this friend was an atheist. She had been dubious about my search from the beginning. "Why," she wanted to know, "would you take on such a thing? I mean, is this something you've thought a lot about? You're not a religious scholar."

There's nothing trickier than trying to talk about personal belief. Add on top of that trying to talk about personal belief with a very smart atheist. But I had some things to say. And wasn't that the whole point, really? To opt back in? To form—if not an opinion—a set of feelings and instincts by which to live?

"I would say yes." I took a leap. "I believe in God more than I did a couple of years ago. But not the God of my childhood. Not a God who keeps score and decides whether or not to inscribe me—or anybody else—in the book of life."

"So what exactly do you believe, then?" She sipped her tea and waited for a better answer. I wanted to tell her that exactly and believe don't belong in the same sentence.

"I believe that there is something connecting us," I said. "Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that great consciousness."

I looked at my friend for any sign of ridicule, but saw none. She was nodding.

"An animating presence," she said.

That was as good a word as any:presence. As in the opposite of absence. By training my thoughts and daily actions in the direction of an open-minded inquiry, what had emerged was a powerful sense of presence. It couldn't be touched, or apprehended, but nonetheless, when I released the hold of my mind and all its swirling stories, this was what I felt. Something—rather than nothing. While sitting in meditation or practicing yoga, the paradox was increasingly clear to me: Emptiness led to fullness, nonthought to great understanding.

My son Jacob's Jewish." I thought of Sylvia Boorstein's elegant phrase: complicated with it. We were complicated by our history, by the religion of our ancestors. There was beauty and wisdom and even solace in that. I no longer felt that I had to embrace it all—nor did I feel that I had to run away. I could take the bits and pieces that made sense to me, and incorporate them into the larger patchwork of our lives. I reached into my handbag for the well-worn black notebook I carried with me everywhere, writing in it only passages I had come across that had great meaning to me. "This is the way I've come to think of it," I said, turning the pages. The wisdom of a Catholic monk: "Here—from Thomas Merton. `Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of you and, by myself, cannot even imagine how to go about knowing you. If I imagine you, I am mistaken. If I understand you, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know you, I am crazy. The darkness is enough.' "

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead), Daniel Pink upends the notion that the best way to get people to do their work is to reward them with money, status, or shiny objects. Through interviews with innovative moguls and the academics who have gathered data on the subject, Pink, a contributing editor to Wired, says that what really motivates us are intangibles—the big three being autonomy, mastery, and purpose. People, he says, want and need to be intrinsically (Type I), not externally (Type X), motivated and do their best work when they are.—Carlene Bauer

Can you be both externally and intrinsically motivated?

Daniel Pink: I think everyone is a mix of both. In some ways, these types are analogous to introversion and extroversion. Every extroverted person can spend a minute alone, and every introverted person can have a conversation with another human being. It's just a matter of which one is the driver and which one is the passenger.

Do these motivations change with age?

Intrinsic motivation is often a product of experience—maybe you have a set of experiences that allow it to surface. I do think that, early in your life, when you're first in the workforce, you're willing to sacrifice a little intrinsic motivation to get some external rewards: credentials, a decent salary, a chance to move up in your job. As people get older and gain experience, they recognize that they're happier doing stuff they like to do, and chasing after external rewards is at some level hollow.

How do external rewards backfire?

Think back to all those groovy Internet start-ups that were doing great things, animated by an intrinsic sense of purpose...and then they went public. Their employees ended up spending all their time refreshing their browsers, checking stock prices, and not designing great software.

What has happened in our economy or culture that would give people the mental freedom to become more intrinsically motivated?

Look at opensource software. Traditional notions of motivation say this isn't possible, that no one would ever do high-quality work for free, but here you have some of the best software in the world being written by people who aren't getting paid. Many of them have jobs working for pay, but those jobs may not be satisfying, so to get intrinsic satisfaction they end up doing this work for no money. It's a very modern phenomenon, one that's occurred in the last 10 to 15 years.

But what if you can't design software? What if you're working at a place like Dunder Mifflin?

Even in The Office, you can see the stirrings of potential Type I behavior. Dwight Schrute, as much of a lunatic as he is, is really into being a good salesperson. He's someone who is seeking mastery. That's why Dwight is top salesman and mad that Jim got the promotion. The big absence there is a sense of purpose. Michael Scott won't infuse people with purpose. That's where a good boss comes in: a boss who recognizes that you can actually find autonomy, mastery, and purpose in jobs that are fairly routine.

How about if I throw out some names and you tell me if they're Type I or Type X. Bill Gates?

If you were hell-bent on becoming wealthy, I don't think your move would be to drop out of Harvard.

Hillary Rodham Clinton?

You get a sense that she was a classic Type X résumé-builder. On the other hand, she's animated by a sense of purpose. She could be one of those self-actualized Type I Boomers—she was an '80s corporate lawyer, and now she's helping bring peace to the world.

Almost totally Type I. Here's somebody who's all about autonomy. She made her way in the fashion she decided. As far as mastery, see how hard she works to put on a good show. She's trying new stuff, and while there have been flops, she wants to experiment. She's provoking people into seeing the world differently. Though that might be overstating it.

Paris Hilton?

Totally Type X. She's self-obsessed, not self-directed. She's demonstrated pretty much zero mastery of anything significant. And does anyone—including Paris herself—believe her life is animated by some broader purpose? People who are famous for being famous are a great example of extrinsic motivation run amok.

Successful interiors tend to be the product of Slow Decorating, the constant, pleasant process of bringing together art, furniture, colors, and fabrics you truly love over time. But when one's home is an out-of-syncwith- self wreck, fast action is necessary. We turned to the women behind the reliably tasteful site Remodelista.com—below, from left, Julie Carlson, Francesca Connolly, Sarah Lonsdale, and Janet Hall—to give us their checklist for a one-month dwelling transformation.

· Start with your entryway—it sets the tone for your living space. Evaluate your storage needs; if you're short on places to hang coats and jackets, consider a freestanding coatrack (we love the Tra Coatrack from Design Within Reach for $250). Add a reflective gleam to a dark entryway with a mirror, and set the stage with a pendant light; two low-cost options we like: the wicker Leran pendant from IKEA (about $50) or West Elm's simple clear glass Globe Pendant at $129.

· Cover your living room furniture in inexpensive slipcovers sewn out of painter's drop cloths to create a neutral canvas; layer on throws, vintage fabrics, and pillows. Most hardware or paint stores stock a good selection; we like Chicago drop cloths and runners: dtep.com.

· Create an art wall in an unused hallway or a bathroom. Choose a theme (maps, black-and-white ink drawings, etc.) and an assortment of frames from IKEA or from thrift stores. Hang framed works from ceiling to floor; use light pencil marks to trace out a pleasing layout.

· Rearrange your furniture so you have a conversation area in your living room. If you aren't ready to choose your ultimate investment rug, go with sisal or an inexpensive white wool rug from IKEA.

· Invest in black-out blinds for your bedroom. We like roller shades with continuous loop control. These can be sourced from the Shade Store or Smith+Noble.

· Upgrade your kitchen and bathroom hardware. For sleek nickel or stainless-steel hardware, you can't go wrong with cabinet and bin pulls from Japanese company Sugatsune. For a more retro look, we like cabinet pulls from Rejuvenation in Portland, Oregon. A great low-cost, modern doorknob is the Schlage Orbit (it's a favorite with architects). For a vintage style, try Olde Good Things and assemble a set of matching porcelain knobs.